


Variations on a Theme of Polymorphonuclear Healing

by nisakomi



Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-15
Updated: 2017-10-15
Packaged: 2019-01-17 13:58:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12367218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nisakomi/pseuds/nisakomi
Summary: One night, it goes a little something like this:the Pavarotti that makes the princes sleepless.





	Variations on a Theme of Polymorphonuclear Healing

**Author's Note:**

> i have a lot of story notes for this fic so i'll put them at the end but the summary comes from lyrics in 걔 세 (i'm him) by winner's mino in the 2014 s/s album and refers, i presume, to pavarotti's iconic renditions of nessun dorma from puccini's turandot...which in turn made me think about paganini and variations on a theme of paganini...giving us the fic title.
> 
>  
> 
> this was written blasting metric's satellite mind and 걔 세 on repeat as loud as i dared at 2am, the morning of the deadline for the [3rd wonhui collab](https://twitter.com/wonhui_makelove), theme: [love hotel](https://wonhui-make-love.postype.com/post/1079563).
> 
>  
> 
> the point of this round, i think, was to write 19+ fic, so naturally after writing rated fic for the past two collabs i thought this was The Ideal time to write my fave rating aka gen. unedited, as always.

 

 

*

 

 

 

Someone in the room next door won’t stop screaming.

The woman’s voice, high-pitched and strident, filters easily through the thin walls of the university dormitory building, otherwise silent this early in the morning. Or late at night, depending on your perspective. “I am going to fucking kill you! Why won’t you just listen to me?! Don’t you have anything to say? Do you think I won’t really kill you?”

The last question is deftly punctuated with the sound of something shattering, and then a sharp noise as each of the pieces smashes, presumably falling to the ground.

That’s not what wakes Wonwoo up.

He could sleep through someone drilling a hole into the shelf right beside his bed, or sledgehammering through the drywall on the other side, having trained himself to rest through the countless drunken singalongs as students returned to the dorms on weekends, slumping loudly against the doors without a care to those on the other side.

What wakes him up is his bladder.

His return to consciousness is accompanied by only a vague acknowledgement that something or another is happening in the room beside his. Mostly he thinks about his bladder. Is it urgent enough that he has to get up or can he just sleep through it and contribute to self-induced kidney failure fifty years down the line? Wonwoo squeezes his already closed eyelids, and then forces them open. He squints into the darkened room and feels the strain in his groin lurch. Damn. He really needs to pee.

A quick check of his phone reveals the 2 a.m. timestamp of the argument next door, and the only pause in Wonwoo’s stride once he rolls out of bed is to mutter a quick, “if you’re going to commit murder you should at least do so quietly,” at the wall before shuffling, with due haste, toward the communal bathrooms.

Up until the moment when he finally relieves himself, Wonwoo’s brain runs along a single track: pee pee pee pee pee pee pee. Afterward, when his muscles relax and he can feel himself wake up for real, taking back control of his mind from his urinary tract, he starts gaining real awareness of his surroundings. That there were things happening around him. First, that his neighbors were practicing Greek plate smashing at two in the morning, and second, that there was someone standing at the sinks, bleeding profusely out of their arm.

It’s a bad wound. Wonwoo can tell because he’s not wearing his glasses and can still make out the giant gash and blood soaking through the paper towels. Frankly, it looks like it needs stitches.

Wonwoo doesn’t say as much. He walks up to the empty sink and washes his hands, carefully avoiding staring at the mess of a human being beside him as he lathers, then rinses the soap off before reaching up to grab a towel from the dispenser. Which is empty. Because the guy beside him has probably used up the entire week’s supply trying to clean himself up. They make eye contact in the mirror while Wonwoo shakes his hands of excess water and then lets them dangle beyond the edges of his shirt sleeves to air dry.

He’s too short-sighted to tell what the guy looks like, but he can recognize the sloppy attempt at a smile, and then the impending awkward explanation all people feel compelled to supply when caught in an embarrassing situation. Wonwoo tries to school his face into an uninterested expression.

“Walked in on my roommate fighting with his girlfriend,” the guy says sheepishly. “Ended up with a glass thrown at my head and got caught trying to protect my face.”

Wonwoo purses his lips. All of the rational parts of his brain are sending him a cohesive message: Do not engage. You peed. Go back to bed. It’s almost three.

_The guy is still bleeding._

It’s almost three, so the rational parts are a lot quieter than they should be. It’s almost three, so obviously, the sleep-affected part of him asks, “1013?”

The guy blinks.

Slowly, Wonwoo swivels one of his wrists upward and indicates a finger toward himself. “1011.”

“Ten—ah. Oh. Um.” A wince, not out of pain. “Sorry about the commotion. Did they wake you up?”

No, Wonwoo’s bladder woke him up, not the noise coming from next door, but he doesn’t say anything for a moment so the other guy continues on.

“I know this is probably asking a lot, but I would really appreciate if you didn’t report it to the RA. I’ll owe you. It’s just…we really can’t afford to move somewhere else right now.”

Wonwoo’s not paying attention. He can smell the metallic scent of the blood now, although it seems to have stopped spreading further through the nearly soaked paper towels. He takes a step forward.

The guy flinches, oddly, but lets Wonwoo lift his arm up and clamp his free hand against the cut forcefully. Wonwoo presses down harder to give him the memo that he needs to keep the pressure here and then flays his fingers out in a signal to stay put.

The current occupants of 1013 are still shrieking at each other when Wonwoo gets back to his room.

“Oh, you’re wearing glasses,” says the should-be-occupant who was forcibly dislodged, once Wonwoo returns to the bathroom.

Wonwoo peers up at him over the wire-frame rim and then looks back down to finish washing his hands again before rummage through the first aid kit in his hands to find the antiseptic cream.

“Did you wash this?” Wonwoo asks, the longest sentence he’s voiced to the other since first finding him.

“Ran it under water for a bit, yeah.”

Wonwoo dips his chin and then grabs a hold of the guy’s elbow to pull it down from where he had obediently been holding it elevated with applied pressure. The bleeding has stopped now, any longer and Wonwoo really would have thought the guy should go to a hospital, and he carefully peels back the damp towels, making sure the clotting is on the skin and not stuck to the paper. It takes a good amount of ointment to cover the length of the wound, but it doesn’t look as deep as he thought it was, on closer inspection. Neither of them say a word while Wonwoo wraps tape around a layer of clean gauze, snips the end, and then steps back.

That’s enough excitement for this time of day. Wonwoo’s eyes glaze over as he stares at the white bandages, mind blanking while the guy shuffles around a bit on his feet. After a passage of time Wonwoo can’t quantify, there’s a blurted, “Thanks.”

Wonwoo looks up from the guy’s arm to his face, and forces himself to hold back his startle. He hadn’t been paying attention to anything but the cut after he put his glasses on, and before that he hadn’t really been able to get a good look. It makes sense. He’s the textbook definition of conventionally attractive, sharp strong jawline, large eyes, prominent nose bridge, defined cheekbones, the kind of face you’d expect to get business cards from entertainment company scouts just walking through Gangnam, and a height to match Wonwoo’s to boot. A face it makes sense to protect. Wonwoo processes all of this with two rapid blinks, and then notices the expression on his face, like he’s expecting something from Wonwoo.

“Moon Junhui, third year cogsci.”

“Jeon Wonwoo,” he replies slowly, as if unsure of his own name. “Third year. Med.”

“Ah. Guess I can trust that I’m not going to die then, doc?” Junhui says, laughing.

Wonwoo thinks to himself: you have a four-inch laceration in your forearm from someone flinging dishware at you and you’re laughing.

He says: nothing.

He turns and leaves with the first aid kit clutched in one hand, his other palm stifling a yawn. When he glances back through his peripheral vision, the bleeding idiot, Junhui, is leaning against the frame of the closest cubicle, eyes half-closed but trailing after Wonwoo’s retreating form.

“Are you planning on sleeping here tonight?” Wonwoo asks after a long beat where he struggled with whether or not he should say anything, and if so, what he should say.

Junhui smiles lightly. “My phone and wallet are inside the room and none of my friends live in this building. Don’t think I’m going back anytime soon though.”

He doesn’t ask for help.

_Why_ doesn’t he ask for help?

If Junhui had asked Wonwoo if he could kip in his room for the night, Wonwoo would have flat out said no.

But Wen Junhui doesn’t ask for help. So naturally, Wonwoo has to offer it.

 

 

 

*

 

 

 

“You know it’s three thirty in the morning, right?” Soonyoung’s voice has no bite in it; he’s too busy trying to keep his eyes open in the dining area of his grandmother’s _hasukjib_ to infuse his tone with any annoyance. Besides, he should know Wonwoo wouldn’t call like this for no reason.

“Sorry to interrupt your beauty sleep, but I’m afraid even a hundred years couldn’t turn you into sleeping beauty.” Wonwoo’s own voice comes out lower than expected, attributable to his own sleepiness.

“Mean. You’re so fucking mean Jeon, waking me up at ass-o’clock for a favor and you’re going to be this mean to me?” Soonyoung turns to Junhui, who’s still holding his injured arm gingerly. “I’m so sorry you have to deal with this asshole. You can stay however many nights you need but this one’s on me, because no one should have to deal with his rudeness and be forced to pay money for it.”

Wonwoo’s tired, but he’s not tired enough to let that one go. He grabs Soonyoung’s neck and pulls him into a headlock. “I wasn’t the one who fucked up his arm, sleeping ugly.”

Soonyoung makes a pathetic wheezing sound, and elbows Wonwoo hard when he finally lets go. “He still has to put up with you being a dick.”

Wonwoo gets one final poke in while Junhui watches the both of them with something akin to horror. It’s an expression that looks uncomfortably like amusement. He turns his head away. “Shut up and show us the room.”

It’s a tiny little space, as expected, but there’s a bed and no one screaming, and the added promise of warm food in the morning. Junhui certainly looks relieved, and thanks the _hasukjib_ owner’s grandson profusely with deep ninety degree bows, leaving Soonyoung looking simultaneously flustered and pleased with himself.

“Really, Soon-ah,” Wonwoo says quietly, “Thanks.”

“Hey. Things happen, and we had an empty room.” Soonyoung shrugs. “What are friends for, right? Anyway, I’m going back to bed. See you in the morning.”

The door clicks behind him, leaving Wonwoo and Junhui in the room alone.

Junhui’s staring at him, blinking those huge eyes of his with the deep double lids in a disarming manner. “Are we friends now?”

“What?”

“Your friend – he said this is the kind of thing friends do. But we just met each other? And I don’t think all friends would do this for each other…”

Wonwoo shrugs. He could leave now. He _should_ leave now. He would, but he says, “No need to thank me or anything.”

“Oh!” Junhui shuffles backward into a wall – the room is nice and clean but it’s also cozy and there’s not much space in any direction. His hands come up to his mouth, fingers long and covering up the embarrassment rouging his cheeks. “I’m very thankful! Thank you very much, Jeon Wonwoo,” Junhui says formally, bowing at the waist until his back is flat enough to balance glassware on. When he straightens, the collar of his shirt is skewed sideways, hanging off one shoulder more than the other. The guy is a mess.

Wonwoo slides a hand into the pocket of his bright turquoise sweats, thumbing the side of his phone to confirm its presence. It’s not like Wonwoo is any less of a mess.

“I meant, you really didn’t have to. But I guess it’s your major, trained to rescue people or whatever, right?” At this Junhui chuckles, an unexpectedly low and dry sound, but the smile on his face is sincere. He’s really amused by this.

“I don’t have a saving people thing,” Wonwoo says, holding back an eyeroll.

“What’s that?”

Here Wonwoo does roll his eyes. “Never mind. Do you always just let people beat you up and lock you out of your own house?” He means to say it the way Junhui had said his piece. With a laugh. Light-hearted. Banter.

But Junhui’s face changes into a thoughtful expression and his voice gets very very quiet. “That’s not what happened.”

Wonwoo doesn’t need to know what happened. Would he be willing to hear why there were threats of enucleation at two in the morning if an explanation was offered? Possibly. But it’s also now been two hours that he’s been awake at the dead of night and he definitely has a physiology lab at ten.

“To be honest, I think Minghao takes a whack at me every time we walk past each other but that doesn’t normally draw blood.”

Honestly, fuck colloid osmotic pressure. “Are you…a masochist?” Wonwoo asks. He’s never met a masochist before. This is far more interesting that hydrostatics.

“It doesn’t actually hurt!” Junhui protests. “Jeez, I can’t believe I made it sound like I’m getting bullied by someone younger than me.”

“You are being bullied by someone younger than you,” Wonwoo informs him matter-of-factly.

“No, it’s not like that…We’re friends. Brothers. Well, related somehow, I think. You know when you’re a kid and you call everyone aunty and uncle? I’ve always called his parents that so I just tell people we’re related. I don’t actually know how we’re related, but I assume it’s true because he’s never corrected me when I introduce him to someone, and Minghao is not the kind of person to watch me make a mistake and let it go. Actually, he’s not the kind of person to watch anyone make a mistake and let it go. Not even little kids. My little brother, he’s like ten, got a skateboard as a present once and my mom and dad let him just kick it around but Minghao taught himself and my brother how to skateboard because he wanted him to ‘get it right’.” Junhui frowns and holds a few fingers to his chin. “Stepdad. I guess I should be specific. Anyway…”

Hearing Junhui talk, Wonwoo decides, is a little like riding a ferris wheel. At the bottom, your stomach is calm and quiet. But at the top, after that brief moment of nauseating weightlessness, it feels like you’re speeding down toward imminent doom. Junhui talks in cycles, alternating between shy reticence and bubbling verbosity.

And like riding a ferris wheel, it’s kind of…amusing. If you’re into that whole tickle in your gut sensation.

Wonwoo puts both his hands flat on the wall behind him, to brace himself, and then leans back until the weight of his torso is spread evenly across his shoulder blades. It’s a good impact position for Junhui’s next cycle, after Wonwoo summarizes, “So he beats you up and his girlfriend beats him up. Or, more precisely, throws plates at him.”

“She wasn’t really…It was an accident. Well, I mean, yes she was throwing things on purpose but I know Yebin was aiming away from him on purpose. She wasn’t trying to aim at me either, but she’d already let go before I’d opened the door.”

“A regular occurrence?”

Junhui shakes his head quickly. “No, or you’d be woken up in the middle of the night a lot more often, wouldn’t you?”

Wonwoo doesn’t tell him that he really only woke up because he needed to pee.

“It’s just…they’ve been having this fight. Well this was the one real big fight, but it’s kind of part of one longer ongoing disagreement about things that they’ve been having and arguing about, I guess.”

Couples fight. That’s normal. But they’re still standing at three or four in the morning, when there’s a perfectly functional and comfortable mattress at their disposal, which is not as normal, in Wonwoo’s well-educated opinion. Especially not when he’s this exhausted. Out of his mind exhausted. So he pushes off the wall and slides face-first into the comforter.

“Hey.” There’s a poke in Wonwoo’s shoulder. “That’s my bed.”

“But I procured it for you, so I’d say it’s practically mine.”

Junhui tries to grab the comforter out from under Wonwoo but Wonwoo’s instinctive response is to turn and aim for a bite at Junhui’s hand.

“Fine,” Junhui says, cradling his snatched back fingers to his chest. Wonwoo had completely forgotten about his injury. But Junhui doesn’t seem perturbed at all when he gingerly sits down on the mattress as well.

Wonwoo waves a hand. “Go on. With your story. I got comfortable so I could listen,” he says, voice muffled by the thick layer of fabric near his mouth.

“Are you sure you didn’t get comfortable to fall asleep here?” Junhui asks with an amused tone. He pokes at Wonwoo again and Wonwoo retaliates by kneeing him in the thigh. Junhui laughs. “I can’t believe you convinced me you were finding me a sleep tonight when you were really just finding a bed for yourself.”

Back at the dorms, Wonwoo has his own bed. He doesn’t need this one. Technically, neither should Junhui. “I’ll fall asleep if your story’s boring.”

“It’s not really my story…” Junhui murmurs, voice going quiet again. They’d finished the ride and returned back to the bottom of the ferris wheel, but strangely enough, a swoopy feeling lingers in Wonwoo’s stomach.

“The people the story belongs to,” says Wonwoo, “I don’t know them, so it’s like you’re just making one up. Reading a novel.” He begins to say more. Thinks of a remark about getting the story off of Junhui’s chest, or siphoning it out of his mind. But something tells him that Moon Junhui is not the kind of guy who relieves pressure by unloading burdens onto other people. Something tells Wonwoo that would only make him feel more troubled. He clamps his mouth shut, getting the taste of cotton sheets on his tongue.

“Fiction is usually prettier than fact anyway.”

“Hm?”

“Hm? So…You know how I was talking about calling Minghao’s parents aunty and uncle?” Junhui doesn’t wait for a reply before jumping into the next part. “Well, Minghao’s dad runs a pretty successful company…I think they specialize in producing adhesives or something, but it’s all high tech and very profitable, and the expectation is that Minghao works there and eventually takes over.”

“The problem is, he’s Chinese. The company’s in China. Whereas since undergrad, Minghao’s life has really been here. His internship last summer was with POSCO, and obviously it helped that he speaks Chinese, but it’s not like he’s doing badly for himself here. So he told Yebin that he was going to stay instead of taking over the company. Sounds like the right thing to do right? Only she told him he was being stupid and that he should go back and they would work things out between them despite the distance. But the thing is, Minghao told his dad that he wouldn’t fly back to China between semesters and ended up telling her that he could stay in Korea over the breaks because his dad wasn’t expecting him to start until after he graduated…And then she found out that Minghao was actually supposed to be in China and, well…It’s all just a big misunderstanding.”

“She was pretty angry,” Wonwoo says, which was, if you asked him, a massive understatement.

“Well, Mingyu says that’s the thing with girls. They get mad for a reason, but to understand their reasoning you can’t just make your assumptions and think about the logic from your perspective. Because they don’t make the same assumptions, or something like that. They wonder about everything so nothing is certain.”

“Maybe your roommate should have just listened to her then.”

“That’s what Seokmin said after Minghao told us that he was just going to tell her that he didn’t need go back and that everything was fine. But Jisoo-hyung thought that could be an issue too because it’d seem like Minghao was giving in too easily? She might want to see him fight for their relationship, or something like that.”

“Really?” Wonwoo asks pointedly. “Do you think that it made things better?”

“I don’t know. It seems like you shouldn’t really be focused on the reaction though, doesn’t it? Like if you try to predict what happens and aim for the result you want, it turns out worse than if you just do the thing you think you should do without basing it on how someone else might react. Because you can’t really know, right? I mean, that’s what Mingyu said, anyway, after Jisoo-hyung brought that up.”

Wonwoo shakes his head and braces himself on his elbows, rising up so that he can turn his head properly to look at Junhui, who’s staring down at the linens with a morose sort of expression on his face. “But what do you think?”

“What? Like I said…”

“No,” Wonwoo says, shaking his head again. “You told me what Minghao thinks and what all of your friends had to say. But what about you, Moon Junhui? Why do you think your roommate’s girlfriend was throwing glass around tonight?”

“I…”

Wonwoo shifts his weight again, this time to lean his head on one hand, propping up his weight with one elbow. He looks at Junhui, whose eyes remain downcast, giving Wonwoo the opportunity to peer closely at his face without notice. It makes sense.

“What’s your name?”

The expression on Junhui’s face gets mousy, eyes wide and lips drawn together in confusion. He looks tiny and not at all his age when he lets out a befuddled, “Huh?!”

“Your name,” Wonwoo repeats calmly. “What is it?”

“You just said my name…did you forget it already? Maybe you really should go to sleep…”

“No, silly,” Wonwoo says. His mouth slowly curves up into a languid smile, and a soft snort of amusement leaves his nose. “Why would I ask for something I already know? I mean your name in Chinese.”

Junhui enunciates the syllables slowly, and Wonwoo carefully parrots them back to ask again for Junhui’s opinion. “Wen Junhui, what do you think?”

“I think…” For a moment Junhui goes quiet, the calm at the bottom of the ferris wheel, low to the ground and gentle. He’s found a thread that’s gone loose in the hem of the quilt cover and picks at it with a focused expression on his face.

In the silence, Wonwoo closes his eyes briefly and feels himself lulled into slumber. When Junhui speaks again, the sound of his voice washes over him like a splash of cold water to the face in the morning, waking up all five senses from top of the head to tips of the toes.

“I think if I were her I’d mostly be angry that he lied about it,” Junhui decides after his period of silence. “I think if he told her that he made his choice and was sticking by it she’d come around, maybe even see the gesture as romantic. But because he did one thing but told her another, I think it seems like he wasn’t giving their relationship enough faith.

“Maybe you’re right.” Wonwoo moves his right hand to join Junhui in plucking at the frayed ends of fabric. Their fingertips brush momentarily, and Junhui’s skin is warm and smooth against his. Wonwoo feels like he’s sitting at the top of the ferris wheel again, suspended in the weightless state when your stomach feels as if it’s rushing up to your throat.

“It doesn’t really matter what I think,” Junhui says softly. “I’ve never dated anyone seriously. I’m not exactly in a place to give anyone relationship advice.”

Junhui’s eyes meet Wonwoo’s briefly over their hands and then look away, giving Wonwoo another opportunity to stare at his face. It really makes sense.

Thickly, Junhui says, “I wish I could though.”

“Do you think you deserved this?” Wonwoo asks, grabbing Junhui’s hand, the one where his forearm is covered in gauze from wrist to elbow, and waves it around. “You do. You think it’s your fault you didn’t help your roommate make better life choices even though it’s his relationship and he’s an adult.”

That’s a festering wound. That’s something infected, something that Wonwoo shouldn’t touch without gloves or some long pointy instrument that allows him to stay far away.

“Sorry,” says Junhui.

Wonwoo doesn’t say anything back. He doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t know why Junhui’s apologizing to him. He has no idea where to even begin—

Junhui’s hand is still in Wonwoo’s. They seem to notice this at the same time, Junhui’s posture hunching over and Wonwoo going perfectly still, staring. He eventually pulls himself into a sitting position and traces stick figures over Junhui’s palm, the flesh under his fingernail fading to a translucent white before returning to its regular pinkish shade. Each human he draws disappears into the skin, like Junhui’s not-there existence, present but not in his story at the same time.

Junhui can’t see what Wonwoo’s drawing, but he doesn’t pull his hand away.

“Thanks.”

Wonwoo preens momentarily over his invisible Picassos.

“I mean, for everything, but also…I don’t know. Your friend joked about you being mean just now but actually…you’re really nice.”

“I’m not nice.” Wonwoo scowls.

“Sure you’re not. You’re _super_ nice.” Junhui raises an eyebrow at Wonwoo’s deepened look of displeasure, forehead and nose wrinkled like he’d smelled something vile. “Why else would you help a near stranger as much as you helped me?”

“I don’t have a saving people thing,” Wonwoo says stubbornly.

“It doesn’t have to be a saving people thing. You can just care. Be a nice person.”

It’s one thing to have empathy. It’s another to let yourself get invested in other people, where personal feelings cloud rational judgement and prevent the necessary efficiency and efficacy in his field. Wonwoo helps people. Why he helps them, and why he helped Junhui tonight, those are two separate things.

“I don’t have a saving people thing,” Wonwoo says again, “but I might like to fix them. If I can. To make things less broken.”

Junhui beams at him, a radiant smile where the light from the ceiling lamp reflects off crooked white teeth. “I think you’re good at it. I think you must be really good at what you do.”

“Shouldn’t have asked for your opinion,” Wonwoo mutters. “Now you think I want to know what you think all the time.”

Junhui giggles. “You know, I can’t believe no one asked me what I thought before this though. I never noticed. We were all sitting there during those conversations but I just nodded along while other people talked…”

Wonwoo’s face briefly flashes with a pained expression. Junhui had been standing there bleeding out with that cut and perfectly content to spend the night in the dorm bathroom. He can definitely believe it. It seems a perfect exhibit of who Wen Junhui is. The kind of person to tell you that his roommate is Chinese but forget to tell you that he himself is Chinese as well. The kind of person to forget to tell you what he thinks because he’s too busy trying to tell you about all his friends’ opinions first. The kind of person who never asks for help when they most need help, thereby the kind of person Jeon Wonwoo most wants to help.

The kind of person Jeon Wonwoo likes.

They’ve only known each other for several hours but Wonwoo can already tell that he likes Wen Junhui.

Actually, he could tell much earlier than that, when Junhui had smiled at him, holding a cloth dripping with his own blood, and laughed despite his injury.

Junhui doesn’t need saving. Junhui doesn’t even need fixing. Junhui’s not broken; he’s more like a beneficial mutation than a missense one. That piques Wonwoo’s interest more. An enigma to be solved, a mechanism to linger over, to think about and to awe at without wondering what’s wrong.

Junhui’s staring at him, Wonwoo realizes with a start. He’s staring because Wonwoo’s staring, blinking those round, defined eyes, lips drawn together and skin pulled tight over his high cheekbones.

“It makes sense,” Wonwoo says, observing Junhui’s face with fascination.

“It does?”

“It makes sense that you would try to use your arms to cover your head to protect your face from being cut instead,” Wonwoo explains. “It’s a very nice face.”

He’s swaying forwards a little because he’s too tired to stay awake and hold himself upright. But Wonwoo has to draw back quickly when Junhui springs to his feet, nearly kneeing Wonwoo in the head as he rises. “I need the restroom,” Junhui says quickly, and then dashes off.

Wonwoo starts laughing to himself. He’s probably gone delirious from the exhaustion. But it’s funny: the reason they’re here now is only because of urinary urgency.

 

 

 

*

 

 

 

“You’re still – you’re still here,” Junhui says when he returns from the restroom.

Wonwoo nods with his eyes closed, his nose pointed to the ceiling, body lying back horizontally across the bed. “I tried getting up but I was too tired,” he murmurs. “And the bed’s comfy. I just want to sleep here.”

“Oh.”

Wonwoo cracks one eye open. “I can leave, if you’d like.”

Junhui, in typical bottom of the ferris wheel manner, says in a voice barely above a whisper, “I don’t think I’d like that very much at all.”

The mattress sags a bit when Junhui’s weight joins Wonwoo on the bed, although the springs don’t make much complaint. They’ve reached the 5 a.m. mark, and sooner than later the first rays of dawn will filter through the curtains, marking the end of a sleepless night with its pale pastel light. He can’t feel the warmth from the sun yet, but he can feel the warmth radiating off of Junhui’s skin, and his pulse quickening in response. Wonwoo’s stomach does a loop inside his abdominal cavity, and then sits, hovering somewhere like his entire gastrointestinal duct has been extricated. There will be no need for amusement park tickets anytime soon.

“What do you think, Wen Junhui? Why might someone be nice to someone else? What are the possible reasons?”

First, you come up with a hypothesis.

“I don’t know. I think…maybe it could be for the same reason someone gets flustered when someone is being nice to them.”

“And why’s that?”

“Maybe,” Junhui says, a whisper just by Wonwoo’s ear, “because you like them.”

Once you have your hypothesis, you have to test it.

“Do you like me, Junhui?”

“No one’s ever been this nice to me before,” Junhui warbles.

Wonwoo laughs. “Doesn’t take much to impress you, huh?”

“Do you…”

“What, do I like you?” Wonwoo supplies, helping the beet red Junhui complete his sentence. Wonwoo laughs again, but he doesn’t answer. Not directly anyway.

Someone’s alarm clock in the next room starts ringing, one of those real alarm clock beeps and not just a phone. Wonwoo forces his eyes open. It’s not the alarm that rouses him. “I did bring you to a hotel the first night we met. We could be a love motel cliché.”

“Do you wanna know what I think? I think that’s awful.”

“No? You prefer the route where we scream loud enough that our neighbours can hear us at two in the morning and throw housewares at each other, shattering all our possessions?”

Junhui starts laughing.

Wonwoo laughs too. He doesn’t know if they’re laughing for the same reason. Wonwoo’s laughing because one trip to the restroom led him to finding a man with a beautiful face dripping blood out of a cut telling him his life story and deciding that Wonwoo was a decent enough person for listening to him. It has nothing to do with the screaming. Everything to do with his bladder.

“Kissing then,” Wonwoo says, once they’ve both finally calmed down. “What do you think about that?”

“I think that’d be nice,” Junhui says quietly.

When their mouths meet, several hours post-coagulation, the cut in Junhui’s arm is teeming with neutrophils, swarming to clear debris and any sources of infection. This innate immune reaction comes swiftly, with these granulocytes appearing less than an hour after detection of a foreign body.

According to Wonwoo’s scientific observations, that’s twice as long as the time it takes to fall for Wen Junhui.

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> i think of this a little bit like my version of chris evans (of captain america fame but i would recommend snowpiercer, the iceman, sunshine, the losers) and his directorial debut, _before we go_. that movie has a 22% on rotten tomatoes. it's about two strangers who meet serendipitously and over the course of a night experience enough chemistry and bonding that their relationship deepens. not very much happens in that movie, and i don't think very much happened in this story.
> 
> about two years ago i woke up at 2am needing to pee and heard the person living down the hall having an extremely loud breakup including things being smashed. after i came out of the bathroom i opened up a word document, typed in the words "heard you breaking up", saved the file as "neighbours au" and then went back to sleep. i didn't think about that document for ages until this prompt came out. i think, if i had more time, that story was a rebound story. if i really wrote that story it would have involved more hotels, more change in dynamics, more in general. junhui's need for personal development, and how that may or may not reflect in a healthier relationship with wonwoo and how wonwoo contributes to jun's development. i didn't have time for that story tho, so i told niz maybe instead i could write about someone else's breakup. i think i was too invested in the idea of a loud breakup. as i was talking to niz we discussed how much junhui works in this not-very-present way, like he's there but he rly defines still waters run deep i think, when he described himself as 闷骚 i was like yeah okay whatever but now i get it i think. i could write essays about the way my perception of junhui has morphed and changed and grown with him but in the end i thought what was more interesting is that despite wonwoo being the kind of person to pull junhui out of his non-presence, wonwoo himself often seems like he's moving through water. i thought wonwoo would be the person to put a defibrillator to jun, but jun would be the person to really break wonwoo out of the amniotic sac and contribute to his rebirth, to breathe real air instead of numbing himself from everything by cushioning it with a layer of fluid or whatever. obviously that never made it into the fic. i think i'm a lot more enamoured with that story than i am with the one that i did end up writing so maybe i can think about it some time in the future. some time when i don't write a fic in the middle of exams and just mad project all of the things i should be studying onto wonwoo...doctor wonwoo...when will this vocational obsession of mine desist...do i rly have to write the hospital au...
> 
> this fic isn't rly substantial enough for thank you notes but i rly rly rly wanna thank nizhni for everything, like being the fic soundboard i needed, but also like all these years of support. i also rly wanna think jenjen for telling me all the nice things i wanted to hear without me saying i wanted to hear them. not sure i deserve it but both of u mean a lot and i love u.
> 
>  
> 
>   
> until next time,   
> nis.


End file.
